Monday, December 5, 2011

Benoît FELTEN (pictured),CEO and co-founder of Diffraction Analysis, published the executive summary of the analyst firm recent research - " Do data caps punish the wrong users? A bandwidth usage reality check".

The research analyzes whether the recent trend of data caps/quota/usage based billing service plans does limits broadband data usage. "In order to investigate these issues, we took real user data[ISP in North America] or all the broadband customers connected to a single aggregation link and analyzed the network statistics on data consumption in five-minute time increments over a whole day .. Our analysis confirms that data consumption is at best a poor proxy for bandwidth usage:

The top 1% of data consumers (hereafter Very Heavy consumers) account for 20% of the overall consumption.

Average data consumption over the period is 290 MB, while consumption for Very Heavy consumers is 9.6 GB. This roughly equates to data consumption of 8.7 GB and 288 GB per month, respectively.

However, only half of these Very Heavy consumers are customers of the highest service tier (6 Mbps), which implies that half of them have bandwidth usage restricted to 3Mbps (the next service tier) or lower.

61% of Very Heavy data consumers download 95% of the time or more, but only 5% of those who download at least 95% of the time are Very Heavy data consumers.

While 83% of Very Heavy data consumers are amongst the top 1% of bandwidth users during at least one five minute time window at peak hours, they only represent 14.3% of said Top 1% of users at those times.

"In conclusion, we state that policies honestly implemented to reduce bandwidth usage during peak hours should be based on better understanding of real usage patterns and should only consider customers’ behavior during these hours"